Facing Up to Threats of Nature

PHILADELPHIA — Weather has become unusually localized in this city. On a recent evening, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. And yet it was raining hard, though only on a few isolated individuals in an alley near City Hall.

They included a power-dressed couple who had evidently just uncoupled, and bloodied members of an aviation crew who had crawled out of the wreckage of an airplane. Since there was no way life was going to look sunny to these folks, a man with a hose was on hand to turn tears into personal thundershowers.

What was it Verlaine said about how it rains in the city as it rains in his heart? Or was that Buddy Holly? Anyway, Pig Iron Theater Company, the inventors of this mini-storm-center, is taking the idea literally for a prologue to an enjoyably anguished site-specific performance piece called “99 Breakups,” staged in and around the stately landmark museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Climate change, emotional and ecological, would seem to be much on the minds of the artists participating in this year’s FringeArts festival, which has colonized Philadelphia through Sept. 21. The most spectacularly literal offering is “WetLand,” a floating installation by Mary Mattingly on the Delaware River. It’s a work that simulates life in a world succumbing to rising water levels, depicting what its creator describes as “a watery, sinking future.”

At the same time, at the Painted Bride Arts Center in the Old City neighborhood, “The Adults” aspires to conjure what its director, Whit MacLaughlin, calls “the environment of a room full of people changing like the weather.” This elaborately choreographed multimedia presentation from New Paradise Laboratories takes its cues from Chekhov’s “The Seagull” and the paintings of Eric Fischl.

This is the rare “Seagull” riff (a favorite form for theater experimentalists in recent years, for some reason) that takes the aborted play within that play (by the unhappy Konstantin) very seriously. This seems appropriate when you remember that Konstantin’s poetic little drama is all about a future in which nature lives on without the presence of humans.

In all honesty, I was much happier with “The Adults” before the Chekhov connection fully asserted itself, which happened in the last third of this 90-minute piece. Up to that point, I was having a swell time watching the ways Mr. MacLaughlin, the set designer Matt Saunders and a very limber cast were translating the languorous anxiety of Mr. Fischl’s more summery paintings (some of which were projected on the walls of the lobby before the show) into animated flesh.

Gracefully aided by the subliminal nudging of Thom Weaver’s lighting and Bhob Rainey’s soundscape, Mr. MacLaughlin and Mr. Saunders have summoned a vision that may ring ominous bells in those just back from vacations near bodies of water. You know that uneasiness that descends during downtime in sylvan settings, when your workday identity starts to slip away?

That’s the sensibility that infuses the first hour of “The Adults,” in which meaning is conveyed largely by body language and sensory impressions. A group of urban invaders shows up — tapping on, and framed by, sliding glass doors in a delicious tableau — to disturb the silence of Alex (Matteo Scammell), a young man trying to write in a house by a lake.

The games, both sporting and erotic, played by these people are rendered in various body-contorting pas de deux, in which civilized and primal impulses seem to do battle. Violent spasms often overtake the characters as they snap pictures of one another, go swimming and scuba diving, and drink shot after shot of tequila, while shimmering, slightly threatening videos of the natural world outside are projected behind them.

The irritations and ennui that set in during unstructured play time for grown-ups are wittily conveyed, as is the sense of social selves melting into primitivism. Then, darn it all, one of the actresses (Emilie Krause) puts on a long, white 19th-century-style dress, and Alex starts to recite Konstantin’s introduction from his play in “The Seagull.”

And, with that, a show that has seemed both beguilingly mysterious and familiar becomes leadenly self-conscious and academic. With impressionistic theater like this, it’s usually better when artists avoid declaring their intentions too openly. In the realm of the avant-garde, sphinxes are better company than schoolteachers.

“99 Breakups,” which I caught on the same day, is more successfully sustained. Again, I generally preferred its more ambiguous moments, when you weren’t quite sure what was happening, to its more traditional and explicit vignettes. But, as directed by Quinn Bauriedel, it’s a delightfully and resourcefully realized work of environmental theater, which takes its audiences on a museum-style tour of dissolving relationships.

The production begins with great disorienting verve, while the audience is still waiting outside. That’s when the rain sequence I described above happens. (The crashed plane that the airmen crawl out of is a street art sculpture by Jordan Griska.)

Entering the museum, you pass a guitar-strumming busker, singing of heartache. You are then confronted by one of several angry performers who have mementos (a toothbrush, a CD, a stuffed animal) that they claim you left with them and now want to return to you. Take whatever is offered; it will determine your role in what follows.

At this point, you are probably starting to see the world as a planet propelled by people walking out on one another. You stop to listen to a rock band, and it breaks up before your eyes. And then the tour proper begins, but not before the audience has broken up into several discrete groups, each led by a sorrowful docent.

I won’t go into too much more detail about the subsequent scenes enacted for your consideration and contemplation, which occur in various salons, offices, elevators and staircases of the museum. They are all variations on a theme, some (the best of them) presented as largely wordless pantomimes and others as miniature dramas of disaffection.

I suppose the idea of love having a built-in self-destruct mechanism should be depressing. But it was hard to feel that way, since the cast seemed to be so enjoying its dramatic duties. Isn’t there a part of us that enjoys such self-dramatizing, overwrought moments ourselves, at least to be talked about afterward?

Anyway, I was heartened by the presence of a smartly attired gray-haired man and woman in my group, who seemed to cling to each other for balance. At one point, our docent asked us to raise our hands to certify the number of breakups we had experienced ourselves.

“What did she say?” the man asked me. When I explained, he chuckled. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he said. “We’ve been married for 66 years.”